Coach Patrick was a referee at the UT-Dallas qualifier on Dec 6, and he started taking photos of Reverse Engineering models that were especially nice or interesting. We’re now creating a gallery of reverse engineering models. If you’d like to add your model to our gallery, just send a photo to pmichaud@pobox.com .

Unfortunately Patrick didn’t record the team numbers for the airplane and duck models; if you recognize this as yours and would like credit, please let us know.

If you missed yesterday’s clinics at UT-Dallas, you can still attend the clinics on October 25th at UME Preparatory Academy. We’re also asking coaches and attendees to please fill out the pre-clinic survey at http://goo.gl/forms/ciYDA3UkSi , so we have an idea of how many are attending and what would be best to cover.

Also, several people at yesterday’s clinic were asking about the motorcycle wheels and the wheels used on our robot; links for these wheels are now available on our Resources Page.

We create and maintain the resources page so that all of the announcements and files that come up over the season are available to us in one place. But it’s also useful for others and we like to share resources freely. If you think of anything else that would be helpful to keep on the page, please let us know!

Be sure to also join the North Texas FLL Google Group, as there are often many helpful announcements and discussions taking place there, and it’s an excellent place to ask questions.

Here’s an annotated video of our team’s 550 point run at the FIRST LEGO League 2014 World Festival, which was good enough to earn 6th place in the Robot Game. Veronica was the lead driver for this round, with Anthony handling attachments.

We were very pleased with the team’s and robot’s performance at the World Festival. The team’s goal for the season was to create a robot that performed consistently well in the robot game, and at the World Festival all robot runs in practice and competition were over 500 points (scores were 562, 562, 520, 550, and 520). Republic of Pi was the only team to score over 500 on every official robot run at the World Festival.

Republic of Pi participated at the 2013 North Texas FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Regional Championship tournament at the Hockaday School on February 1, 2014. They won the 1st Place Champion’s Award and 1st Place in Robot Performance — the highest awards in FIRST LEGO League at the regional level.

The team now moves on to compete in the FLL World Festival in St. Louis on April 23-26. Thank you to the Perot Museum and everyone in the North Texas Region that volunteered and competed to put together a great regional contest!

In December the team would frequently play the video of Ylvis’ “The Fox” while working, and we started making up our own Nature’s Fury-related lyrics. I told the team if they qualified for the Regional Championship we’d make a video.

The organizers from the Perot Museum then let us premiere the video at the championship yesterday.

On the North Texas FLL coaches’ mailing list there’s been a lot of discussion and confusion regarding the height of the border walls on the tables used by the Perot Museum in the region’s contests. Yesterday and today our team attended the Coppell HS FLL scrimmage, which once again was a great success. Since the tables used at the scrimmage were reportedly from the Perot Museum (can anyone confirm this for us?), I was finally able to take some definitive measurements.

The tops of the border walls appear to be between 3″ and 3 1/8″ above the mat surface. See the photo below. If you’re wondering how it’s possible for the walls to have this height, it appears to me that the walls were created from 2×4 studs that have been jointed and planed on the bottom to produce a perfectly square fit with the table surface. Thus the sides are somewhat less than the 3.5″ one would expect with unfinished 2×4 studs.

While at the table I also took measurements of the height of the cargo plane lever; it appears to vary between 4 5/8″ and 4 7/8″ above the mat surface. Because the walls are actually slightly taller than 3″, I expect the cargo plane models to be exactly as in the model build instructions, with none of the modifications for “short border walls” described in the challenge document. The angle of the red lever depends a little bit on the way the plane is loaded and the tension of the string.

I hope this helps resolve questions and helps teams prepare for the qualifier tournaments. However, don’t absolutely count on these heights — some Perot tables could be different from others, and “things happen” such that a qualifier might end up using tables from another source. As mentioned in the challenge documents, teams are expected to design for border walls ranging anywhere from 2.5″ to 3.5″ in height.